Must not count Muslims

A French mayor has been accused of acting like a Nazi today after looking at children's names to establish how many were Muslims.  Far right politician Robert Menard counted up first names such as Mohamed to compile illegal statistics, in tactics which evoked memories of the Holocaust.

He claims to have established that almost 65 per cent of youngsters in Beziers, in the south of France, were Muslim, while also complaining that 'the majority of mothers don't speak French.'

Mr Menard told France 2 television station: 'Sorry to say this, but the town hall has, class by class, the names of the children.

'I know I don't have the right to do it. Sorry to say it, but the first names tell us their religion. To say otherwise is to deny the evidence.'

As a secular republic, France does not officially compile any statistics at all about people's religions, instead treating everybody as citizens equal under the law.

But Mr Menard's tactics caused outrage, with Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve saying counting children by religion 'takes us back to the darkest hours of our history'.

Mr Cazeneuve was referring to the Second World War Holocaust when the occupying German, with the help of French collaborators, 'rounded up' anyone suspected of being Jewish.

SOURCE